Engine Yard Introduces Developer Support for Merb

The new Merb support offering coincides with the release of Merb 1.0, which was previewed last month to the Merb community.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Nov. 17, 2008) – Engine Yard, the leader in cloud deployment and Open Source tools for Ruby and Rails, today introduced support for Merb, a lightweight, Open Source framework for building Ruby web applications. The new offering coincides with the release of Merb 1.0, which was previewed last month to the Merb community.

"A lot of work went into delivering the Merb 1.0 release, which offers a flexible, modular choice for Ruby applications," said Lance Walley, CEO of Engine Yard. "With this new support offering, Engine Yard is providing a safety net to give developers and businesses peace of mind."

Merb support will be available in two levels. Basic Application Support gives customers the ability to report bugs directly to the Merb development team and receive responses. Incident Support is available on top of Basic Application Support and gives customers up to five incidents per year. In addition, Incident Support customers can participate in a premium IRC channel staffed by leading Merb developers.

"This is a great move on Engine Yard's part to provide Merb support," said Carl Mercier, CEO of Defensio. "When we built our Defensio anti-spam service on Merb five months ago, paid support wasn't available, but the Merb team was exceptionally responsive and helpful even then. Now, I look forward to having a dedicated team I can call on if there is a problem or a bug."

Merb is designed to be fast and scale efficiently. It relies on an extensible, pluggable architecture that offers developers a higher degree of configurability and modularity than Rails. Though Merb's core code base is kept to the bare minimum, it offers powerful features such as flexible routing, more control over groups of processes, and a coherent maintained stack. Additional features can be plugged into the framework using standard gems. Merb also features an ever-growing pool of plugins, contributed by the community. For a full list of Merb 1.0 features, see http://merbivore.com/features.html.

Pricing and Availability

Basic Application Support is available for $1,200 per year per user. Incident Support is $1,200 per year for five support incidents, and requires a Basic Application Support subscription. For more information or to purchase Merb support, please visit www.engineyard.com/merbsupport.

About Engine Yard

Engine Yard provides the platform and expert support for deploying Ruby and Rails applications to the cloud, giving customers the peace of mind and stability needed for building sites and applications on demand. Engine Yard has a track record of hiring expert talent and fostering open-source innovation, including stewardship of the Rubinius and Merb projects. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard was founded in 2006 and is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com. Visit http://engineyard.com